Hey, so saw this came out, too bad I can't get one for a while. Oh well.

So was wondering though. So I know that floating point math is murder on a regular arduino. And that lack of speed with FP math can cause some problems if people want quickly updating things thats doing a bit of math with angles and whatnot.

So its nice enough that the due is just over 5x faster. But the 32bit processor, does anyone know how much better it would fair doing large amounts of FP? (got this little GPS based project working around in the brain. Lotsa angle math to do, and not just on the lattitude and longitude)

Note, I don't believe the Arm SAM3X8E that the DUE uses supports floating point, so you are still using an emulator. As others have said, since the DUE has a faster clock rate and is a 32-bit processor, means the floating point emulation should be faster. Note, Arduino floating point uses 32-bit values for float, double, and long double, while I believe the Arm boards use 64 bit. This means the mantissa and exponent ranges are higher.

The recently released Teensy 3.0 uses a Cortex M4 board that also does not support floating point. There is a varient of the Cortex M4 (M4F) that does have floating point, but the Teensy 3.0 doesn't use it.

The Raspberry Pi does support hardware floating point, and runs at a much higher clock rate (700Mhz), so it should have much better floating point. The higher clock rate also means a higher current draw, so you will need to think about more batteries and recharging for long running aps. However, at present, it is more setup to run Linux than to run embedded devices, though I'm sure people are working on it.

I don't recall off hand whether beaglebone or mbed support floating point or not.

..there are some Cortex M3 benchmarks in http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,121568.75.htmltry to run it on an 8bitter, compare clock to clock ad you will see.. as a rule 64bit fp calcs are 2x slower than 32bit fp calcs in general..

Fixed point may be what you really need. Floating point is designed to handle both very large numbers and very small numbers where precision is not that important. If what you need is hundredths (or thousandths) of a degree for GPS readings, then use integers and write the code understanding that the values are hundredths of a degree (or volt or foot or temperature degree). This makes any math hugely faster. Perhaps it's only necessary to think of the value in full units when it is displayed for human viewing.

Fixed point is very handy for accumulating small bits to gain resolution.An example using 16 bits, where the top 8 bits (H) are the integer component and the bottom 8 bits (L) are the fractional component.